


adronitis

by zanykingmentality



Category: To All the Boys I've Loved Before Series - Jenny Han, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Introspection, Light Angst, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining, Unrequited Love, Vignette, Writing Exercise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 17:37:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17430458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zanykingmentality/pseuds/zanykingmentality
Summary: adronitis: the frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone — wishing you could start in the beginning of their psyche and learn outward.





	adronitis

**Author's Note:**

> this is a quick thing i scribbled in class and thought i'd upload to get back in the swing of things~ 
> 
> unbeta-d as usual, so please forgive any lingering errors!

Peter’s not a poet, not by any sense of the word.

 

Still, it makes things easier to work his feelings out in words that can be sounded out, letter by letter. To put feelings on paper, simple terms, like _Emotions for Dummies._ Because Lara Jean’s eyes always shy away from him, and he doesn’t know why this affects him so much, except he _does_ and refuses to say it out loud. So he writes it down on scratch paper in his messy, slanted handwriting, and goes about his day.

 

Maybe that’s why he offers to write Lara Jean notes every day. Something about it, about giving her the words that have become a piece of him, makes him feel like he’s slowly lifting the weight off of his shoulders that’s been hanging there for so long, held up by a meager string.

 

Somehow, he doesn’t think she feels the same way.

 

Well, whatever. Peter’s nothing if not persistent, and he doesn’t give up on what he wants. He’s determined to charm and respect the _hell_ out of Lara Jean until she looks at him. A scary thought, he notices, if he’s looking at things from her perspective: her acute feeling of fear and loss that persists, like fog in the autumn sunrise. And some stupid high school boy comes traipsing into view, asking for favors and help and love she can’t give ― yeah, it’s not difficult to imagine how his hopes could crash and burn.

 

_Still._ He still wants to _try._

 

That doesn’t mean he wants to risk his friendship with her, though. He’s starting to suspect she doesn’t have a lot of those, even though he can sometimes hear the hallways buzz with admiration of Lara Jean Song-Covey. He’d be lying if he said it didn’t make him happy and a little jealous.

 

“Lara Jean’s really pretty,” Greg notices one day. “You lucked out, dude.”

 

“I know,” Peter says, and he almost wants to sigh because he hasn’t _really_. (Not yet.)

 

Sometimes she doesn’t see him in the hallway. She walks by with her head angled toward Chris or Lucas, laughing along to something they say, and the jealousy bubbles up in Peter’s stomach like a thousand volts of lightning.

 

She’s more than just _pretty_ , though. Lara Jean is phenomenal. The two of them have shadows in the same places, under their eyes and between their words, and Peter’s learning to pick apart her every mannerism to check how she’s feeling, what’s been going on. Sometimes she won’t tell him, and he respects that, because as relationships go, he’s probably the _last_ person she wants to date ― _fake_ date ― right now. Who wants a forgotten crush to come bounce into their life with a proposition of _fake_ dating? Like all those middle school fantasies could have been real, if someone had just said _something_?

 

God, why had Peter gone out with Gen?

 

Words. He scratches them into paper. Tiny pops of peppy energy, slanting synonyms for sadness, graphite fingerprints from the paper’s stain bleeding onto his hands. Wherever there’s space, he finds himself writing two words, eight letters. _Lara Jean._

 

It all comes back to her, doesn’t it? Peter scuffs a hand through his hair. The kiss in seventh grade. The homecoming dance in ninth grade, when he stared at her wishing he could ask her to dance. Ski lodge dreams, lunchtime fantasies.

 

_Lara Jean, you look cute today! PK_

 

It becomes unbearable. The walls around her are so hard to knock down, as hard as he tries; he learns about her mother, her sisters, her father’s open-mindedness. He finds hidden meaning in the odd trinkets left scattered about her floor and the movies she sighs out loud to. Sometimes he finds himself watching her instead of the movie, just to see what strikes her, what doesn’t.

 

If Peter were a poet, he’d have found a word for this frustration; but he is not, and no amount of strange combinations of words can express the feeling in all its intensity.

 

She’s in his _head_ , like a voice that whispers the most beautiful of secrets, like a physical form laying next to him on the carpet.

 

“Just tell me how you feel, Peter,” she whispers to him on his floor.

 

“I can’t,” he says back. “You don’t feel the same.”

 

The vision of her in his head turns to him, eyes half-lidded, a beautiful smile playing on her lips. “All you have to do is ask.”

 

The Lara Jean in his head likes the way he fumbles with his words and the dumb expression he gets when he’s thinking too hard, but Peter’s not so delusional as to believe that the _real_ Lara Jean would feel anything along those lines. Still, he can hope.

 

Hope, and imagine how it would feel to have Lara Jean’s hands in his hair, lips on his mouth.


End file.
